Fragrances as Art, Displayed Squirt by Squirt

‘The Art of Scent’ at the Museum of Arts and Design

From left: Aimé Guerlain, the creator of Jicky, introduced in 1889; a rendering of the perfume stations in “The Art of Scent” exhibition; and Ernest Beaux, creator of Chanel No. 5, which made its debut in 1921.Credit
Left to right: Guerlain. Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Mrs Gilberte Beaux, Gilberte Beaux Collection.

The way we think of a perfume today often has more to do with how it’s sold than what it actually smells like. Whether it’s Lady Gaga’s Fame or the early-20th-century classic Chanel No. 5, now promoted by Brad Pitt, the focus is typically on the shape of the bottle, the color of the packaging and the images of romance — or celebrity — constructed by a marketing department.

But there is another way to appreciate fragrance: as a pure art form born near the turn of the 20th century, like Modernism itself. That, at least, is the vision of Chandler Burr, the curator in charge of the two-year-old department of olfactory art at the Museum of Arts and Design.

“The fundamental goal of the department,” Mr. Burr said during a recent interview at his office, “is placing scent as an artistic medium alongside painting, sculpture and music.” For however “brilliant” or “extraordinary” the greatest scents may be, he added, “they’re not recognized as works of art, and the artists who create them are not recognized as artists.” Mr. Burr, who wrote the 2003 book “The Emperor of Scent” and used to write about fragrances for The New York Times, aims to change that when he opens his first show at the museum on Tuesday.

Called “The Art of Scent 1889-2012” (through Feb. 24), the exhibition will use 12 fragrances to chart the evolution of modern perfumery, starting with Aimé Guerlain’s Jicky (1889), among the first to blend synthetic with natural ingredients, and continuing through Chanel No. 5 (1921), created by the great perfumer Ernest Beaux and generally considered the first modern fragrance, to contemporary scents like Olivier Cresp’s cotton candy-scented Angel (1992), which Mr. Burr described as “a work of beautiful overt Surrealism.”

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the show is its spare installation, designed by the architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro. While most scent exhibitions — there have been a smattering over the years, though rarely at mainstream museums — rely on displays of packaging or raw ingredients, visitors to this one will enter a minimalistic white cube whose walls dispense puffs of fragrance. The labels, projected on the walls, will name each scent, as well as the perfumer who created it (until fairly recently, their names were known only within the trade). And the wall texts will describe each scent in terms typically reserved for visual art and architecture like Modernist, abstract or Brutalist.

“To a degree it’s a problem of language,” Mr. Burr said. “We have not had anything other than a marketing language applied to these works.” Using terminology associated with established art forms, he added, “will allow us to understand these works and their aesthetics and what they communicate and why they exist.”

When asked to speak more straightforwardly about what particular fragrances smell like — citrus, say, or sandalwood — Mr. Burr became inflamed.

“I am completely opposed to this idiotic reductionism of works of olfactory art to their raw materials, which is as stupid as reducing a Frank Gehry building to the kind of metal, the kind of wood and the kind of glass that he used,” Mr. Burr proclaimed.

The olfactory art department came about after Mr. Burr proposed the concept to Holly Hotchner, the director of the museum. It struck Ms. Hotchner that fragrance was analogous to photography, which even into the 1970s was seen as “a very different venture from art,” she said.

She also saw fragrance as a perfect fit with the overall program of the museum, which has explored some fairly radical approaches to art and design. Previous shows have focused on subjects like handmade bicycles and contemporary art made from organic materials like chicken bones, insects or spices; visitors are often encouraged to smell or touch examples of the materials used.

“People who know us kind of expect that when they come here — to learn something new, to see something new,” Ms. Hotchner said. “This will definitely be in the vein of experiencing something new.”

After Mr. Burr joined the museum, he and Ms. Hotchner began figuring out how to translate an extraordinarily evanescent art form — one that is typically encountered on the skin, or lingering in the air — into the visually oriented context of a museum.

That challenge appealed to Liz Diller, a partner in Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the firm best known for the High Line in Chelsea and the Lincoln Center redevelopment project. “The real excitement and lure” of designing the scent exhibition, she said, was in figuring out “how to make this work in a place that privileges vision as the master sense.”

The firm had worked on experimental projects like the Blur Buildingat the 2002 Swiss National Expo, a pavilion on Lake Neuchâtel that was essentially made of mist created by high-pressure water jets, and the 2010 exhibition “How Wine Became Modern” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where visitors could inhale the scents of wine from open carafes. This time, “we didn’t want to show perfume bottles, we didn’t want to focus on videos of the scent artists talking, we didn’t want it to be a kind of exploratorium,” Ms. Diller said. “We really wanted to suck everything out of that place except the scent.”

The solution they arrived at involved creating a gallery with 12 gently curved indentations in its walls. Hidden behind each is a scent diffusion machine: a visitor who leans into the curve will set off an electronic eye, causing the machine to release a burst of fragrance calibrated to stay in place for four seconds, without spreading across the room. (Made by the German company Scentcommunication, the machines are typically used in industry trade shows; this is the first time, organizers believe, that they have been used in a museum.)

There will also be a “more social” space, as Ms. Diller put it, where visitors can dip strips of blotter paper into petri dishes filled with the 12 fragrances in the show, and to experience various stages in the development of a 13th, Sophia Grojsman’s 1990 Trésor, via peel-and-sniff cards. But for the most part, she added, her firm’s focus was on making a “wall full of machinery and effects look like there’s almost nothing there.”

As for Ms. Hotchner and Mr. Burr, their biggest challenge may have been corralling the international cosmetics companies and scent makers whose aid they sought in financing the department and putting together its first show. “This was a totally new idea for them, that scents would be presented without marketing and packaging,” Ms. Hotchner said, adding that “it was a longer journey than we’d imagined.”

Nonetheless, they stuck to their guns, refusing to offer guarantees of inclusion in shows — or placement in the gift shop — to companies that gave them help. (The first to come on board was Estée Lauder, a longtime supporter of the museum.)

Of the 11 companies and groups that are now listed as sponsors of the show, eight have scents on display; they are listed on the wall labels as lenders. (In this context, lending really means giving: throughout the run, lenders will donate essential oils for the scent diffusion machines — about enough to produce nearly 600 100-milliliter bottles of eau de toilette.) The only fragrances sold in the museum will be packaged with the catalog, which combines essays by Mr. Burr with small pharmaceutical-style bottles of each fragrance. (The cost is likely to be about $250.)

As for those little-known perfumers, they seem somewhat divided about the idea of becoming “known as great artists,” as Mr. Burr put it.

“To me it’s a very thrilling moment,” said Carlos Benaïm, a master perfumer for International Flavors and Fragrance in New York, who was one of the creators of Prada Amber (2004), which is featured in the show. Mr. Benaïm, who is responsible for some of the world’s top-selling scents, including White Diamonds (1991) and Polo (1978), also observed that “there has been a big evolution of the function of the creative person” since he started out in the industry 45 years ago. Back then, perfumers were effectively ghostwriters, while now, as the show demonstrates, he said, “we are coming into the public view as artists on our own, with our own personalities, our own styles, our own expression.”

But Daniela Andrier, the Parisian perfumer behind Untitled (2010), the first fragrance commissioned by the Belgian designer Martin Margiela and the newest work in the show, sees things somewhat differently. She appreciates the idea of regarding perfume as an art form, she said, especially today, when it is “under a major threat” from the pressures of commercialization and allergy regulations, which increasingly limit the use of natural materials. And by putting it in a museum, she added, Mr. Burr “is putting it under protection in a way.”

But when it comes to her own role, Ms. Andrier, who works for the Swiss scent maker Givaudan, still has a hard time with the concept. “I do think it takes a creative soul to make fragrances,” she said, “but I don’t think it makes us artists.”

Nonetheless, she continued, “museums are filled with things that I don’t see as art.” And in an era where some of the most successful artists are those who are good at marketing, she added, “I do think Untitled is more interesting than a lot of the stuff you find in museums.”

Correction: November 27, 2012

An article on Nov. 16 about the exhibition “The Art of Scent 1889-2012” at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, a show whose installation was designed by the architectural firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro, misspelled the name of a lake in Switzerland where another project the firm worked on was situated. It is Lake Neuchâtel, not Neufchatel.

A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2012, on page C37 of the New York edition with the headline: Fragrances as Art, Displayed Squirt by Squirt. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe